E110: 2023 Bestie Predictions!

(0:00) Bestie New Year catch-up! (2:44) Prediction 1: 2023's biggest political winner (17:25) Prediction 2: 2023's biggest political loser (21:57) Prediction 3: 2023's biggest business winner (30:34) Prediction 4: 2023's biggest business loser (42:03) Prediction 5: 2023's biggest business deal (52:41) Prediction 6: 2023's most contrarian belief (1:03:03) Prediction 7: 2023's best-performing asset (1:07:50) Prediction 8: 2023's worst-performing asset (1:14:46) Prediction 9: 2023's most anticipated trend (1:21:40) Prediction 10: 2023's most anticipated media (1:27:07) Breaking news: OpenAI reportedly in talks to sell existing shares at a ~$29B valuation Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.wsj.com/articles/citadel-posts-record-revenues-for-hedge-fund-securities-operations-11672942665 https://www.reuters.com/world/saudi-arabia-gathers-chinas-xi-with-arab-leaders-new-era-ties-2022-12-09/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/business/europe-natural-gas-prices.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/technology/salesforce-layoffs.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-lay-off-over-17-000-workers-more-than-first-planned-11672874304 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1598076726671642624 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/world/asia/xi-putin-china-russia.html https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1611052287954149377 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-03/blackstone-s-breit-gets-4-billion-from-university-of-california https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gop-rebels-block-kevin-mccarthy-defiance-trump-rcna64280 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chatgpt-creator-openai-is-in-talks-for-tender-offer-that-would-value-it-at-29-billion-11672949279

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to 2023. Everybody's well rested and ready to take on 2023. Yes, Chamath, how was your break?

• 0:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Amazing.

• 0:08Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Saxy Poo, I know you don't go to temperatures that are under 57 degrees anymore. Did you have a nice break? Did you go somewhere warm?

• 0:16David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 0:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, that's a confirmation. Wow, man of so many words. And Friedberg?

• 0:21David Sacks?

  I'm over cold weather vacations.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that does happen at a certain point.

• 0:25David Sacks?

  Actually, we went to Florida. Went to the free state of Florida.

• 0:29Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 0:30David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 0:30Jason Calacanis?

  What's going on in Florida at the turn of the new year, I wonder, that drew you down to the great state of Florida?

• 0:37David Sacks?

  We're just freeing it up in the free state of Florida.

• 0:57Jason Calacanis?

  We have our 2023 predictions now. Play some music and all that kind of stuff. Producer Nick, at this point, let's get to it. Last year, we did our biggest-

• 1:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, did you guys notice that every time we talk about something, somewhere between sort of two months to a year later, the Wall Street Journal ends up writing a big think piece about it?

• 1:15Jason Calacanis?

  Think piece about it, yes.

• 1:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I tweeted into the group chat, like last year, we all talked about Sequoia and distributing public equities and how it's very fraught and difficult. And then today, they write this big article about how people have just burned enormous amounts of billions of dollars that they could have returned to LPs, like these venture investors, by not distributing?

• 1:38Jason Calacanis?

  Makes sense.

• 1:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Three weeks ago, when we did our end of the year wrap up, my big winner for 2022 were the pot shops, right, Citadel? And today, in the Wall Street Journal, an article lands that these guys with $56 billion of AUM, over the last two years, have made almost $45 billion of revenues?

• 2:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Isn't that incredible?

• 2:01Jason Calacanis?

  This is what happens, Chamath, usually.

• 2:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They are, these guys are just crushing it. And Citadel Securities did like almost, you know, seven and a half billion of revenue. I mean, it's unbelievable, these businesses, how good they are.

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So let's get into, and this is typical, Chamath, if you think about journalists, they're trying to get into the conversations that are occurring at the bar after the event, the late night conversation, the group chats. Well, and that's what this podcast is. It's the exposed back channel, right? And so if you listen to this pod, you got the back channel of Silicon Valley, politics, tech, science, et cetera. So let's do our predictions. In 2020, we said our biggest political winner would be, Sax and I both said DeSantis, Chamath said Xi Jinping, and Friedberg said Putin. Who do we think is our biggest political winner going forward? Who do you pick, Sax, biggest political winner for 2023? Who will be your biggest political winner for 2023?

• 2:53David Sacks?

  Well, I went a little bit outside the box here because I think we're going to have gridlock in Washington, so I'm not expecting a ton to be coming out of Washington over the next year. My pick for biggest political winner is Asian American college applicants. There are two Supreme Court decisions that the court heard on Halloween last year. There was a lawsuit against Harvard and another lawsuit against UNC by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, and that they maintain that Harvard and UNC violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because Asian American applicants are far less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified applicants from other groups.

• 3:36David Sacks?

  And the federal courts in Boston and North Carolina rejected this argument, but the Supreme Court took up the cases. So they kind of went out of their way to hear this, and I think that they are going to.

• 3:49Jason Calacanis?

  They're going to repeal affirmative action.

• 3:50David Sacks?

  I think the majority will rule to strike down these policies that really discriminate against Asian Americans. And I think they're the last group in America where it seems to be okay to discriminate against. And I think the Supreme Court is gonna, is gonna find that unconstitutional.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, any thoughts there? You have brought this up multiple times on the podcast over the last two years.

• 4:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have said that this was unfortunately.

• 4:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Affirmative action, when it started, I think, had very, very good intentions. And I still think that there's a place for it. The problem is that these very liberal institutions decided to play judge, jury, and executioner on which minorities counted in affirmative action. And that's not what the intention was. The intention was to look at the establishment and their ability to get their progeny into these incredible schools, even when they didn't deserve to be there. And so I think this was always an issue of classism that was disguised as racism. And people who were in the upper classes of society have always had an edge.

• 5:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You had the legacy admissions into Harvard. You had people, the Kushners, very famously, right? Like the $5 million check from the father that got the son into the school, all of this stuff. It's been well written about. And whether or not those things are right isn't the point. I think the point is that there are folks in emerging lower-middle classes who have the potential to crush, and those kids should have a chance. And you can't just decide who those kids are based on the color of their skin. And in this case, what happened was some blacks were still allowed in, some Hispanics were allowed in, but Asian Americans broadly were discriminated. And that was a really stupid outcome.

• 5:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You cannot punish kids for willing to work their ass off. And I think that that was the unfortunate outcome of what affirmative action has become by 2022. So it is going to get repealed. The reason it's going to get repealed is that, you know, we have case law that very clearly states that any institution that accepts federal funds cannot have any form of discrimination. And this is how these folks who have tried to repeal affirmative action have taken up this lawsuit. And hopefully, the outcome is a more meritocratic system that also tries to create a plurality of different people from different backgrounds.

• 6:25Jason Calacanis?

  Free Burger, any thoughts? If not, your biggest political winner for 2023?

• 6:30David Friedberg?

  My biggest political winner for 2023 is MBS, Mohammed bin Salman. I think that Saudi Arabia will have

• 6:42David Friedberg?

  The most important year in kind of the modern era in terms of their role. I don't know if you guys saw this Reuters report from a few weeks ago, but there's kind of a deepening discussion about the oil yuan trade in that Saudi would sell oil to China and they would get paid in yuan. Saudi Arabia sits at the intersection of the United States, Russia and China. They have relationships with all three nations. And in the kind of conflict and power struggle that is underway, I think that ultimately the direction of where global currency kind of reserves will be taken and the importance

• 7:23David Friedberg?

  of these great nations and who sits atop whom can actually be dictated and significantly influenced by MBS this year by some of the deals and trades he might put in place and the kind of partnerships he might forge. I think as a result, you will see him kind of rise in terms of influence, not in terms of, you know, hey, the world has accolades for this guy. But I think in terms of global influence, he will rocket ship to kind of the top because of this, this kind of jockeying he can now do between these three great nation states and defining, you know, what's going to happen with the US and what's going to happen with China and what's going to happen with currency reserves.

• 8:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Great selection. Great selection. Great selection. The shitty thing, by the way, about your selection is that Biden, our explicit stance is unfortunately quite confrontational with MBS.

• 8:18David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you saw that play out in Q4. We asked them to ease up on OPEC plus to introduce supply cuts and they did some nominal 100,000 barrel per day cut, didn't do much of anything. There was an article, to your point, Friedberg, just recently about Saudi really doubling down on getting the oil out of the ground and monetizing their petrochemicals. So there's just going to be a glut of supply in the market. And we have the least amount of influence with Saudi Arabia than we've ever had. And it seems like we could change that if we decided to, but I think Biden has taken

• 9:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  this very confrontational approach, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

• 9:06David Friedberg?

  And remember, their stated intent is to diversify away from oil and into technology and other kind of emerging growth economies. That's why they funded the Vision Fund. That's why MBS made that big kind of visit to Silicon Valley a few years ago. And there is technology that they want to import into Saudi Arabia and they want to have ownership in around the world. And if the US is creating a barrier for them to import US tech into Saudi or for Saudi to kind of invest in the US, but China and Russia have open arms, and all they want is for Saudi to start doing trades in yuan, it's going to happen. And I think that's where this guy has kind of a real opportunity to shift the global economic dynamic.

• 9:42Jason Calacanis?

  Say what you will about Trump. He had open dialogue with North Korea, China, Russia, MBS.

• 9:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If your enemy's close, sure.

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  You want to be able to talk to anybody, and he was able to talk to anybody. Now, you also want to be able to say, hey, listen, you can't dismember a journalist like Khashoggi, and you need to be able to have both of those ideas in your head. You can't be rigid in foreign policy. You have to be fluid and keep people at the table talking. Chamath, who is your big political, who do you predict will be the big political winner of 2023? Chamath's prediction, everybody. Go ahead.

• 10:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I really like spread trades, right? Where you go long something and short another. So I'd like to pair my biggest political winner with my biggest political loser for 2023.

• 10:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 10:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I am going to focus on the Republican nomination, and I am going to go long Nikki Haley, and I am going to go short Ron DeSantis. Now, let me explain.

• 10:36Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, if you're not watching Sax right now, he is ready to interject. Go Chamath.

• 10:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I think that all of this nonsense, for example, in the House Speaker race, all of the midterm results, what it really speaks to are is people are getting exhausted with the lunatic fringes of both parties. That's point number one. And point, so that favors moderates as an emergent class. And point number two is that if you look back through many, many cycles of Republican and Democratic nominations, it is a very negative thing to be in the lead so early going into the Iowa caucuses in January. And so if you put those two things together, the risk is that DeSantis decays,

• 11:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  things emerge, people attack him because he's the clear frontrunner. And the opportunity, just like it was for Trump in 16, or for Clinton, or for George Bush, not Herbert Walker, but you know, W, is to emerge from the back. And so if I think about a moderate person who can emerge from the back, who can consolidate the ranks, they should probably be from the South. They will have a lot of these purple compromises that Sacks mentioned in their policy program. And they will have a history of winning and a history of normalcy. And so I think that of all of the places where you could ever elect a woman as president

• 12:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  of the United States, I think it will come from the Republicans before it comes from the Democrats. I mean, the Democrats are unfortunately increasingly judgmental. And I think it's very difficult for a woman to emerge there. But I do think that Nikki Haley has a shot. So I'm going to go long Nikki Haley, and I'm going to short Ron DeSantis.

• 12:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I like it. A spread trade for his prediction. Well done. Before Sacks to interject, let me just do mine, and because then you'll have two to interject to. I was looking at Biden and Trump and thinking, hmm, which one of these is going to have the big win in 2023? Since they're two biggest, I think, players. I have a prediction for Trump. I think he's going to lose 50 pounds on the Ozempic. Everybody loves a weight loss story. I think he is going to be indicted by Garland. Is he on, wait a minute, sorry, he's on Ozempic? No, I'm predicting an Ozempic run. And he's going to drop 40, 50 pounds. Then we're going to have a schvelt, Trump get indicted by Garland. And the debates and the

• 13:10Jason Calacanis?

  rigmarole with DeSantis. I think he's gonna go after DeSantis based on weight and height. And then he's going to win the nomination in 24 and we're going to have Trump versus Biden. But this is a crazy prediction here. I think we're going to have a settlement. I think he's going to agree to not run and get the pardon. This is a crazy prediction, I know. But I think he loses the weight, he wins the nom, he gets indicted, and then he gets the Richard Nixon pardon, global pardon for all of the shit he's done. Sax, you can reply now to these two crazy predictions. It's right, right, am I?

• 13:50David Sacks?

  I mean, this is like proof positive that everything you have to say about Trump is an act of projection. I mean, like Ozempic, I mean, like, I mean, are you talking about yourself or Trump?

• 14:02Jason Calacanis?

  Strike, boom.

• 14:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tell us your Ozempic story, Jacob.

• 14:06Jason Calacanis?

  My weight loss journey has been Ozempic and Super Good. Yes, both of those things and fasting. Have you Saxed on any Ozempic?

• 14:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, I've tried it.

• 14:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think everybody should be looking into this if you have weight issues. It's a, it's a, it's a great new.

• 14:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would say even more broadly, I've been reading a lot about these GLP-1s and I, I gotta tell you, statins are a clear wonder drug.

• 14:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 14:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, I think that the 50-year longitudinal data on its value is pretty unimpeachable. Metformin, even taken prophylactically, has shown incredible benefits for cell regeneration, longevity, and glucose management. And the reality is, let's just take a step back. The American diet, we're all prediabetic, okay? So let's just, let's just not beat around the bush. The way that Americans eat and our food supply, and also probably in Western Europe, is prediabetic by definition. It's shit, it's trash.

• 15:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Metformin makes a lot of sense. And again, its longitudinal data is incredible. But I gotta tell you, the early data on these GLP-1s are unbelievable.

• 15:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's extraordinary.

• 15:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's extraordinary.

• 15:12Jason Calacanis?

  From firsthand experience, I would lose half a pound a week when I would diet.

• 15:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but what I'm saying is just it's beyond that. What I'm talking about is insulin response, it's cardiac health. And so if this data tracks like this, man, you're just gonna want to put everybody on these GLP-1s.

• 15:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I just want to also put a disclaimer out here. Do your own research, work with your doctors, whether it's from Metformin or Ozempic, but I had great results on it. I recommend if you're struggling with weight loss like I did for many years, you talk to your doctor about it. That's it. It's not a commercial for Wegovy or Ozempic, but I do think these things are going to change the world.

• 15:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or Mounjara.

• 15:42Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and they're getting better and it seems like people with diabetes are on them for life. So if your question is like, if I could do this for a year to lose weight, you know, I think diabetics are on it for life. So when I made my decision again, work with your doctors, not random podcast or venture capitalists for your health advice. I was like, well, all of these people who have diabetes are going to on it for years.

• 16:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unless it's not toxic, go get a prenuvo scan. Just make sure you got no hiding cancers.

• 16:07Jason Calacanis?

  So there you have it. Those are our predictions. Sax, did you want to respond to any of those?

• 16:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I want the Sax to react to my spread trade.

• 16:13David Sacks?

  Yeah. So, so, so look, I think, you know, if you're going on a betting site, I think that you could place that bet that Chamath made pretty cheaply and probably it's like has some good upside to it. So I don't criticize it as a bet. Do I think it's actually going to happen? No. And I, I think the reason is, is this, that if you look at what's happening right now with the Speaker's race, there's two very clear wings in the Republican Party. There's establishment wing and then there's kind of this populist MAGA wing. And the candidate, whoever it is in 24, needs to unite those two wings. And I think this is really the best argument for DeSantis is he's widely accepted by both. I think Nikki Haley's problem is that she's very well regarded within the establishment wing

• 16:54David Sacks?

  of the Republican Party, but she has no meaningful support within the populist wing. And so I don't think she's capable of bringing the party together, at least at this point in time. She would have to prove, let's call it populist bona fides that she just doesn't have right now. So this is why I think, you know, DeSantis, he does have frontrunner risk. You're right that people are going to keep taking shots at him as long as he's the frontrunner, but.

• 17:18Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 17:18David Sacks?

  But he's capable, he's capable of uniting the party in a way that it desperately needs right now, as we're seeing with the Kevin McCarthy thing playing out.

• 17:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Okay. Let's go for our biggest losers. We'll rip through this. Last year I said Biden and Trump and the extremes. Chamath said the progressive left, again, the extreme. Sax said Pelosi, who just wrapped up her tenure, and Friedberg said US influence globally was the biggest political loser. Let's get our predictions for the biggest political loser of 2023. Friedberg, who do you think will be the biggest political loser of 2023? The world wants to know, Friedberg.

• 17:55David Friedberg?

  I would continue my US influence, but I am going to shift.

• 17:59David Friedberg?

  Here's what I think is going to happen this year. My big prediction is based on, I think the world has too much debt. I think that the economic slowdown coupled with rising interest rates globally and a dearth of kind of asset capital inflows means that there's going to be a lot of issues with the number of debt markets around the world, particularly kind of emerging sovereign debt. Just to give you guys a sense, global debt is about $235 trillion in public and private. You know, that's somewhere between $5 and $15 trillion of interest payments a year, depending on what the net rate is on $96 trillion global GDP. And there's another trillion and a half of unfunded liabilities in the US and pensions and social security and all this other stuff.

• 18:41David Friedberg?

  I think this is the year where a lot of the debt markets start to unravel. So is this a business loser?

• 18:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or a political loser?

• 18:49David Friedberg?

  I'm going to tell it, one second. This is the political, yeah, so the political ramifications, so the political ramifications for me, I think that the entity that steps in to try and support these unwinding moments is the IMF. And I think that no matter what the IMF does, they're going to look bad. I think that, you know, it's sort of like Jerome Powell this past year, right? Like you raised rates too late, you raised rates too quickly, no matter what you do, it has some adverse effect and impact. It's either inflationary or it impacts growth. And so I think the IMF is going to get a lot of heat for either acting not too soon, or sorry, not fast enough, or acting too aggressively and causing inflation as a bunch of these markets face credit risk this year.

• 19:32David Friedberg?

  So my big bet is the IMF is going to play a major role, and we're going to be talking a lot about the IMF later this year. I think as a result, the IMF will get a lot of heat and you'll end up seeing a lot of pressure and political, you know, just like we blame NATO, just like we blame Jerome Powell and the Fed, we'll end up blaming the IMF for a bunch of problems that'll arise. But the natural physics of what's going on is the world has too much debt and not enough growth to cover the debt, the cost of debt. That's it. Okay. And the IMF will be the political kind of, you know, hit that'll result. A little complicated of a point of view, but I think, yeah.

• 20:05Jason Calacanis?

  And who do you have as your biggest political loser prediction for 2023, Mr. David Sacks?

• 20:11David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, Kevin McCarthy may not survive the week, so let me go in a different direction.

• 20:17David Sacks?

  I think California is my big political loser, and I would say in particular, the city of San Francisco. Both are going to have gigantic budget shortfalls. You may remember that this is back in 2021 when we had that asset bubble. California had a surplus of 76 billion.

• 20:35Jason Calacanis?

  Insane.

• 20:36David Sacks?

  Insane. And then 2022 happened, and now the state is looking at a $24 billion deficit. Well, if we had taken, say, a third of that surplus from 21 and put it in a rainy day fund, we wouldn't have to worry about this deficit, but that was never done. Newsom started handing that money out like candy to the electorate to goose his reelection numbers and to get him past that recall, remember? So the state never got a fiscal outlook in order, and now I think it's going to be even worse in 2023. And San Francisco, the city, very similar kind of problem where its tax base is heavily dependent on commercial real estate, which is really suffering.

• 21:19David Sacks?

  So, you know, the city of San Francisco and the state of California, they've moved their tax base to highly volatile capital gains. And with a really lousy stock market, I don't know how these guys are going to meet their budgets. So a lot of pain coming.

• 21:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be a lot of austerity and pain coming, that's for sure. And these people do not know how to manage a budget. They're incompetent. So you say California, Friedberg says IMF, Chamath, who do you think the biggest political loser for 2023 will be?

• 21:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I already gave you DeSantis, right?

• 21:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and I'm in alignment with you. I think DeSantis peaked a little too early, and the forever Trumpers and the chaos is going to be a little too much for him to handle. Okay, now we get into what everybody wants, business, business, business. Biggest business winner for 2023, who do you have, Chamath, for your biggest business winner of 2023?

• 22:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm going to pick something out of my portfolio. I think I'm the only non-trivially large investor in both SpaceX and Relativity space.

• 22:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Relativity Space has a huge, SpaceX is clearly just crushing on all cylinders. And they're really the only game in town with respect to launch capability. And if you just Google it, you'll see that the Europeans, you know, have a hit or miss capability on launch. The Russians are completely unable to do launch now because of all of these sanctions. The private companies in New Zealand or the United States have also had fits and starts, really incapable. Relativity, which is really, which is now the second most highly valued space business, is about to do a launch in the third week of January.

• 23:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the big difference between it and SpaceX, which is sort of why we did it, this is a early YC company, I did the Series A and kind of went along the whole way. They have 3D printed everything. And the reason why 3D printing is interesting is you take a, so if you, if you think a rocket costs $5 billion, it's built by NASA. Elon was able to take that to 100 to 500 million. And if you 3D print everything, you can take that cost to like 5 to 50 million. And so it allows you to just have this repeatability and manufacturability. Now SpaceX also has a lot of 3D printed parts, but Relativity is entirely 3D printed. It has a launch in three weeks.

• 23:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  At Cape Canaveral, I think. And we have like a $10 billion order book that gets unlocked. So I don't know how to see beyond a lot of these market forecasts right now. So I'd rather pick a company, I'll pick something in my portfolio. If the rocket does not blow up, there's a $10 billion order book and this company is now on a trajectory to be as valued as SpaceX.

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right, talking his book times two.

• 24:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And if it doesn't, it goes to zero.

• 24:15Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, go ahead and talk your book times two or three. Let's see if you can one up Chamath. Which one of your investments will be the biggest business winner of 2023, Friedberg?

• 24:25David Friedberg?

  I'm not an investor. My big bet is OpenAI. It's just way too obvious to be anything else this year. As you guys know, there are dozens of startups that are being started right now based on OpenAI's demonstration of Dolly and ChatGPT. I think we're seeing this in the enterprise and consumer markets. I think OpenAI will become, to some degree, maybe, they could be, there's many paths they could take. The AWS providing tooling and infrastructure to all these startups that are building applications for consumers and business users. Or they will end up doing a massive deal with Microsoft. I think it's inevitable they're gonna get a billion-dollar-plus investment this year. They could power, you know, AI-driven Bing search and voice-driven search. They could build their own products and their own tools, and they're becoming great investors.

• 25:06David Friedberg?

  They invested in Descript, which is a product company we use here for our podcast, which is an incredible product. And I think that Sam Altman is a very smart and true investor as well. So for a lot of reasons, I think OpenAI could end up having an amazing year this year, and a lot of different paths they could walk. And we're gonna come out of this year and say they're one of the top tech companies in the valley.

• 25:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Sacks, OpenAI has, of course, increased your ability to talk to other humans. So you're seeing a lot of big wins there, I know.

• 25:36Jason Calacanis?

  He's, how do I talk to a child about their college hopes and aspirations?

• 25:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no. How do I talk to a child about their day?

• 25:49Jason Calacanis?

  It literally is.

• 25:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hello, hello progeny of mine. How are you faring today in this complicated?

• 25:56Jason Calacanis?

  ChatGPT, write me a script of talking to a 12-year-old about their hopes and dreams. Say it in the voice.

• 26:03David Sacks?

  Using GPT for talking points on different topics. We should try that for the pod, you know?

• 26:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, here we go.

• 26:08David Sacks?

  We should have actually, we should have done the GPT predictions. The GPT answer for each of these categories.

• 26:14Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, as a person on the spectrum, yeah, how delightful is this ChatGPT and, you know, your treatment of your condition?

• 26:23David Sacks?

  It's great. Let me, let me get to my answer here. So my, my answer for the big business winner of the year is America's natural gas industry. And I have to admit, this is an aspect of the Ukraine war that I didn't fully appreciate until I read this New York Times article the other day about how natural gas prices in Europe have now fallen to the level they're at before the war. And everyone thought that there'd be this huge shortage and they wouldn't be able to heat their homes. Well, what happened? The, the answer is that Europe completely cut off their dependence on Russian gas. And in fact, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. So physically they separated. But then on top of it,

• 27:07David Sacks?

  they basically started importing liquefied natural gas from the US. And here's the key paragraph in this article from the New York Times is that Europe rapidly built terminals to receive liquefied gas, sweeping away many of the usual bureaucratic obstacles and environmental objections. So in other words, what would normally would have taken decades to get approvals now was all put on a fast track. And Europe is now completely dependent on American natural gas. And I think this is the, again, the thing maybe I underestimated, the cold, hard American interest in this war is to basically turn Europe into a vassal of America's natural gas industry. Previously,

• 27:51David Sacks?

  they were about to be dependent on Russia and Nord Stream was going to make that situation permanent. We've, you know, somebody blew up Nord Stream. Now they're dependent on American LNG. They're going to pay higher prices for that. But it's, uh, it's been a pretty impressive win for the American natural gas industry. And I think Biden has really pulled a 180 here because you remember when he first came into office, he canceled Keystone, he canceled drilling. He was very tough on the oil and gas industry. I think after he then delivered the hundreds of billions for the climate special interest in the Inflation Reduction Act, now he is taking care of the oil and gas industry. I love it. So 180 flip by Biden.

• 28:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and so what you're saying is Biden dynamically change course based on inputs like a great leader would. Okay, well done.

• 28:39David Sacks?

  Well, I don't, I don't listen. I don't know. Well, no, listen, I think Biden has done something politically smart here. There's no question about it. I am giving him credit. Does it mean that this war was worth it? No, I don't. I don't think we should be engaging in oil wars like we did in the Middle East. So I'm not justifying this war, but I am saying that there is a cold, hard American interest undergirding our position, which is it's about LNG. It's not, it's not just about moral platitudes.

• 29:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, strong start to 2023, Vassal and undergirding. Uh, my biggest predictions, I'm working backwards from two here. I think the DoorDash's, Airbnb's, Uber's, Etsy's of the world who need entrepreneurs, they need workers, they need supply. They've always been supply constrained. As unemployment becomes, let's call it what it is, sticky, you're going to see a lot more people participating in gig platforms or entrepreneurial platforms that enable them to make money. So I think they will be huge beneficiaries, especially if they continue to lay off employees like DoorDash and Airbnb did to right-size their businesses. But my first one, my number one, is laid off tech workers. I think laid

• 29:49Jason Calacanis?

  off tech workers who get together in groups of two, three, or four developers, product managers, people who actually build stuff, and start companies together are going to become extremely successful. And they're going to make incredible lemonade from these lemons of these big tech layoffs. So I think the startup space is going to, and these laid off tech workers who choose to take control of the destiny and starts companies are going to be the true big winners. If you do it, do it with two or three friends, because you're going to need developers, you're going to need those, those talented people in the startups that have three founders, get funded faster than the ones with one. Uh, so those are my two winners. All right. Oh, yeah. And last year, our biggest business winners were, Chamath said SMB's, Sacks said Rise of the Rest, Friedberg said Stripe, and I

• 30:33Jason Calacanis?

  said Disney Millennials and Gen Z. Let's go on to biggest business loser for 2023. Friedberg, who do you think will be the biggest business loser in 23 this year, in fact?

• 30:43David Friedberg?

  Okay, so my biggest loser is the general category of capital intensive Series B through D growth businesses in the startup landscape, private companies. Um, as you guys know, there's been a big shift in capital allocation. A lot of the folks who were writing big checks into growth rounds are retreating back to writing smaller checks in seed and A rounds. They don't want to write the $20 million Series B. They want to write the $5 million seed and A round. No one wants to kind of follow the valuation. No one wants to set the valuation for these growth businesses, particularly if after this round, you know, you need another big round of capital and no one's sure if someone's going to be waiting on the other end. As a result, we're seeing

• 31:24David Friedberg?

  tons of these businesses run into capital infusion walls. They can't pivot. I think we'll see what we saw in the dot com bubble where 99 and a half percent of these companies actually die. The half percent that win are going to emerge as the next $100 billion enterprises, the Googles and the Amazons of the world. So there will be light at the end of the tunnel for the winners. But generally, there are hundreds of companies in hardware, in Sin Bio, in biotech, in high-growth enterprise software that require significant sales investment expense. A lot of these businesses where the capital-intensive nature of the business just doesn't have the market for it right now, and investors are all retreating and they're going to be selective. So that's where I think there's going to be more pain.

• 32:04Jason Calacanis?

  Capital-intensive startups.

• 32:05David Friedberg?

  By the way, seed and A investing, hot as a button. B plus. Yeah, that's it.

• 32:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Saks, biggest business loser for 2023.

• 32:15David Sacks?

  Well, I just, by the way, 100% agree with what Friedberg said. But my biggest loser for business in 23 is the consumer. I just don't understand how the consumer isn't going to finally tap out in this economy. I mean, they have a mountain of personal debt, credit card debts at all-time highs. I think the average credit card rate hit 19.6% last week and is expected to rise even further. The mortgage rates are above 7% now, so forget about trying to buy a new home or sell your home. And your stock portfolio is down too, and now layoffs are starting to pile up. So I just don't understand how we're going to avoid a recession. And you saw, you know, Kashkari saying that the Fed's going to keep

• 32:56David Sacks?

  raising 5.4% is his prediction. You know, I don't understand how if rates are at 5.5% that doesn't finally break the back of this economy and we go into recession.

• 33:07Jason Calacanis?

  Saks that the economy is actually broken right now. We just don't have the data because the data lagged 60 days in in most people's minds because it does feel like the consumer is just and real estate has just broken at this very moment.

• 33:19David Sacks?

  It seems like. I mean, the pain is very unequal, right? But in the tech industry, we've been in a recession for a year. I mean, like the growth stocks are down 80%. What Friedberg said is true. No one's going to fund these, you know, high burning companies. There's an enormous amount of retooling that has to happen. Look, I think the recession is here. It's just very unequally

• 33:37Jason Calacanis?

  Distributed.

• 33:38David Sacks?

  Distributed, exactly.

• 33:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, I mean, if you look at it, buy now, pay later, that's a category starting to break credit card debt, as you're saying, hitting, you know, a big

• 33:50Jason Calacanis?

  a bad records in terms of how much we love spending. Also, people's

• 33:55Jason Calacanis?

  savings are going down. So the consumer's back has been broken. I think we're just going to feel it in the in the first and second quarter. Chamath, who's your biggest business loser prediction for 2023? The world wants to know.

• 34:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me just build on what Friedberg and Saks said for a second before I give you my pick.

• 34:09Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 34:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I, this is the conversation you and I had when we just got on. Guys, what I was telling J Cal is at the end of Q4, I did five deals.

• 34:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And four were pro rata, as one was a new deal. And they were all clean markups. So the four deals that other people put money into.

• 34:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I was looking at them and I was trying to figure out, okay, what differentiates these things? And Freebird, to your point, these were super clean startups with very clean cap tables that had clear progress. And then conversely, I had seven converts showed to me for companies whose valuations were anywhere between three and I would say 12 billion. And I did none of them. And not only did I do none of them, nobody else did any of them. And the problem was the real market clearing price was 80 to 90% down. And so I was like, what is going on here? So Free Bird, to your point, I don't even think it's just cash intensive startups. I think it's like all growth companies are in a really bad place. I thought that this growth stuff would get sorted out in two to three months.

• 35:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And now I'm worried it's two to three years. I think it's toxic, toxic.

• 35:20David Friedberg?

  Here's the definition, Chamath. What I think has happened and where I think the cutoff is, is when the value, the implied market valuation of the company based on where public comps are trading is less than the total capital preference in the company, the total preferred stock. And there's so many companies now that raised 400 million at a 2 billion valuation, but the company is actually worth 300 million now based on public market comps. So they're worth less than their preference stack. So how do you sort through that?

• 35:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're worth less than capital. No, this is why I think all these converts are getting done.

• 35:51David Friedberg?

  That's where the rubber meets the road on all these deals. Yeah, that's right.

• 35:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who does the convert benefit? The convert benefits the VCs who want to maintain the illusory valuation that they had before. They do that to, they do that to assuage the limited partner who gave them money, that the marks aren't as bad as they thought. But the people that really get screwed, as Jason said, are the common shareholders. Because eventually those convert deals that do get done, those people will end up owning the company. The cap table gets completely flushed and reset, and the employees get wiped out.

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yep. And then you gotta basically take all the employees who were there previously, who now hate the founder, and you gotta start over and give everybody, yeah, they're wiped.

• 36:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The people that do all the work get fucked, and the people that do none of the work, and who just want to maintain this shell game gets to basically live another day.

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, people are investing, as you gave in the example earlier, like, hey, if it's a $3 billion company, but it's actually worth 750, people, instead of taking the valuation from 3 billion to 750, will say, okay, buy one share at the $3 billion price, and we'll give you three or four shares for free or for a penny, warrants, they're called typically, or, you know, just different ways to structure this. And then all of a sudden, nobody knows the actual denominator. They may own 10,000 shares, but they don't know how many shares are actually issued, because the warrants are not on the cap table. They're in some side document in a folder in a lawyer or CFO's office.

• 37:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So let me, let me tell you my biggest business loser.

• 37:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, please.

• 37:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that the biggest potential business loser this year is Google's search as measured by pure profitability and engagement.

• 37:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's easier for me to see where the the usage comes from as opposed to picking OpenAI or ChatGPT in terms of where the usage goes to. And the reason is because I think a lot of people don't still fully understand how machine learning and AI work, but just 30 second primer. There's two big buckets of work. There is what's called learning, which is how you learn how to make predictions. And then there's what's called inference, which is when you actually type something into the search box, you get the answer. The thing with learning and what ChatGPT is showing is that they have learned by crawling the entirety of the web. There are five or six other organizations that are capable of crawling the entire web

• 38:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in terms of cost, in terms of compute, in terms of the quality of the transformers and the quality of the AI. And so I find it easier to predict

• 38:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the decay in the quality of Google's search as that much better than everybody else than I find it is to predict who will win, because I think that with enough time and money, Oracle, Microsoft, Google,

• 38:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the Chinese internet companies can all compete. Facebook, and so I think that you'll converge on the same training, which will lead to the same inference. And so I think consumers end up getting confused and will end up being able to get high quality search results from many places versus today. You know, you would only think that Google is the only game in town, quite honestly, for most people.

• 39:05Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the statistics show that.

• 39:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Google could lose 10 or 15% of usage to all these other sites. And that may not make any of those sites that relevant, but it'll have a material measurable impact to Google and Google's buy-in.

• 39:18Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic prediction. And I think, you know, ChatGPT or those other ones are going to have a very interesting marketing. Attack that they can do on Google is why search when you can get an answer, right? Hey, we'll just give you the answer. You don't have to search. I had so many losers that I went through here. I'm just gonna run backwards to them. Number five, I thought founders refused to downsize in 2022. Could be big losers in 2023.

• 39:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do you get to have five in the rest of us?

• 39:42Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just gonna tell you my thought process. This was the one I had a long.

• 39:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't care your thought process.

• 39:47Jason Calacanis?

  I thought VC funds founded in 2020. Then I thought crypto because Gary Gensler says it's all a stock. Then I went with you, Chamath. Number four, Google, my God. They got so many headwinds against them with this chat GPT, but I wound up on white collar workers with no hard skills. Twitter going down to, I think Elon said a couple of hundred people is all you need to run Twitter. And I think he said he has 2,000 employees or something like that. He has shown everybody, you know, hey, listen, these more can be done with less. Or these things are overstaffed in a massive way. I think white collar workers now, the idea that you're gonna have four offers and you're gonna be able to play them off each other is over.

• 40:23David Sacks?

  Surplus elites. You're saying surplus elites.

• 40:27Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. White collar workers, AKA surplus elites, people who actually, you know, are mid managers who don't who don't actually code or don't actually build a product or sell a product, don't actually do real work. As I think many people would frame it in the managerial class or the CEO class. Man, they're gonna have a hard time. And this week, Andy, Amazon Andy, cut 18,000 white collar workers, not the blue collar, the white collar workers in Amazon. That was a big turning point. And Benny off, you know, he's Ohana, he is Mahalo, he is Aloha. He does not like to lay people off. He considers Salesforce or family. He laid off 8,000.

• 41:03David Sacks?

  I predicted that.

• 41:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and I mean, that is to me.

• 41:07David Sacks?

  I had a tweet about that. Well, I mean, the reason is pretty simple, right? Their growth slowed down by two thirds in the most recent quarter, but they're still spending the same amount on sales and marketing. So when that happens, your CAC payback explodes, right? You go from three years payback to like 10 years. So they have to cut costs in order to rationalize your unit economics. So and now it cascades, right? Because all of Salesforce's vendors are gonna be getting less money from Salesforce. Because they're tightening their belts. So then those companies are gonna have to cut. And the cycle just keeps going and going.

• 41:39Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And everybody tightens their belts at the same time, freezes the economy, AKA recession. And possibly were so. But mine was a surplus elite. So that's a nice little quartet. In 2022, just so you know, I picked crypto, Friedberg also picked crypto, Chamath said Visa, Mastercard, and Saks said assets classes that benefit from government dumps and pumps.

• 42:02David Sacks?

  Liquidity.

• 42:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. All right. Let's go to biggest business deal of 2023. It's a prediction. What do we think could be the biggest business deal?

• 42:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Easy, easy. This one is easy.

• 42:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Chamath, go. Let's go right around here. Go ahead, Chamath, quickly.

• 42:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Starlink will go public. SpaceX will cut and paste the cap table and we will take that.

• 42:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yum, yum.

• 42:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yum. It'll be yummy and delicious. And my prediction is that the Starlink valuation will be at least half of SpaceX's current private mark.

• 42:27Jason Calacanis?

  Seventy-five billion.

• 42:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Seventy-five billion. It will be phenomenal. And I think the reason why is that I think in order for Elon to have complete financial flexibility and do what he needs to do, and, you know, he talked about this on our pod about the difficulties and the dangers of margin loans and all of that stuff.

• 42:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 42:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's gonna create breathing room for himself.

• 42:48Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 42:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is the simplest and most obvious way for him to do it. It'll give him a ton of more dry powder.

• 42:54Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 42:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I think that this is

• 42:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  an obvious outcome in 2023.

• 42:59Jason Calacanis?

  They already have a million subscribers in their better than nothing beta, as they call it. I have two of them. I think this is a great, great prediction.

• 43:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was the first one to get it for the Global 7500. So.

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I got it for, yeah, Tahoe. So, yeah, similar. So.

• 43:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My plane and your house are the same size.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, exactly. So there you go. But no, there is a point here. People are underestimating the TAM, I think, of this product. The TAM is not existing broadband connections. It's second connections. It's connections where connections didn't exist. It's on RVs, buses,

• 43:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  villages. The best-in-class broadband connection for a plane is called KA band, and it costs 500 grand a year.

• 43:43Jason Calacanis?

  That's ridiculous.

• 43:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you can replace it for, you know, a tenth of the cost, and Starlink on a plane is dramatically better, bidirectionally. So I think Starlink is gonna go public, and I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be the best chance that we have of opening up the capital markets in 2023.

• 44:01Jason Calacanis?

  There's another way of saying people who own private jets, if they are flying 250 hours a year, which will probably be a reasonable number, 200, 300 hours a year, they're paying $2,000 an hour for their internet service. That is bonkers. Okay, Saks? Who is your big deal? Biggest business deal prediction for 2023?

• 44:19David Sacks?

  Business deals 23 prediction is there will be a deal between Putin and Xi. And they met by satellite late last week to discuss ways to further help each other in 2023. Putin characterized it as a no limits partnership. You may remember that the two of them inked a $175 billion gas deal in early February last year. That was three weeks before Putin invaded Ukraine. I think now Russia is even more dependent on China. We've really driven Russia into China's arms. And I think there will be a big deal, not just on energy, but on agricultural products,

• 45:00David Sacks?

  mineral products and rare earth minerals that, you know, Chamath likes to talk about. I think there could be a trillion dollar deal between Russia and China this year. If I was going to go out on a limb and make prediction.

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So there is your 2023 prediction of the biggest deal. The legion of dictators is forming. I do think it's, it is like, you know, the axis of evil. This is more legion of dictators. Like, hey, let's do business together. Friedberg, you got a prediction for the biggest business deal of 2023? This is really going out on a limb here.

• 45:30David Friedberg?

  I'll do two real quick. The first was the similar to what Zach said, but it's kind of echoing what I said earlier, which is the Petro Yuan trade. I think that's the Saudi China trade. If this happens and oil is sold in Yuan, it marks the beginning of, I think, the end of the assumption that the US dollar is the global reserve and the risk free currency in reserve for the world. So I think the Petro Yuan trade, if you guys, here's the Reuters article covering Xi's visit to Saudi Arabia last month, first second week of December.

• 46:13David Friedberg?

  Once this gets inked and signed, it's a real shift globally. I think the other one that I'm, that I'm going to point out that I think is A bit of a out of left field one, maybe. And maybe I'm just gonna look like a total idiot at the end of the year.

• 46:26Jason Calacanis?

  No, do a wildcard, I like it.

• 46:28David Friedberg?

  This is my wildcard. So my wildcard is I think Apple ends up buying something completely out of the ordinary. And here's why. I think Apple's core business, they're facing significant pressure with respect to their relationship and ties to China. As you guys may have seen last week, Foxconn announced that they're actually going further downstream in terms of their production model. And they're trying to diversify away from being kind of the sole service provider to Apple. Apple, as you know, is under such pressure to get out of China politically that they've started to try and invigorate activity in Vietnam and elsewhere. So a lot of pressure on their relationship with their low-cost producer and low-cost production partner. They're also under a lot of political pressure because of the App Store revenues.

• 47:11David Friedberg?

  You guys know this 30% App Store thing that they take. A lot of people are calling it monopolistic and antitrust is getting involved, so they're feeling that pressure. There's also the pressure with respect to the, you know, waning consumer demand for high-end electronics. Samsung last, yesterday, or last week, or yesterday, I think, announced significant declines in consumer demand for electronics, or their forecast as such. That has to impact Apple as well. So when you put all of this together, right, they're, they're, they're being pressured to get out of their low-cost manufacturing center, they're being pressured to stop making money on the App Store, they're being pressured because the demand may be waning, they have to do something big to kind of diversify the business. So I think they might end up doing something like buying a real content company. Maybe they do something like buy a Disney.

• 47:55David Friedberg?

  Maybe they do something like buy an automotive company like Fiat Chrysler. I think there are a number of these kind of like, what may seem today outrageous deals that Apple might end up kind of being pressured into doing so that they can get ahead of their forecast of the impact that all these pressures are gonna have on their core business. And so I think this is something interesting to kind of think may happen this year. I certainly have no insight or intel on, on anything, or I could be completely wrong on this one, but it feels like they've gotta do something this year in order to keep that business growing.

• 48:24Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is, I think, I love your wildcard, because the MBS, China trade and that relationship, sure, legion of dictators. But this one is really good. It's hard to buy Disney, monopolistic issues, but buying a car company, pretty easy, because that's a fragmented market. I love this prediction. I mean, now with Tesla with this depressed stock price, Apple can make a run at Tesla. They have, they could almost buy it with cash. Let alone BMW, Volvo, one of those brands they could buy easily. What a great prediction for me. The prediction is Amazon's three-legged stool grows into a sturdy chair with a fourth pillar. For those folks who are not familiar with how Amazon has built their businesses, there are three pillars in their stool.

• 49:08Jason Calacanis?

  E-commerce, obviously, when you buy stuff, Prime memberships, which is kind of considered a separate revenue stream. And of course, AWS cloud computing. I think the fourth is going to be this continuation of following the health stream, not advertising, because that's not a consumer-based product, that's just a way they make money. Health is going to be a big one for them. They obviously acquired One Medical, which was a small purchase. I think they're going to buy Roman hymns, they're going to buy Peloton, they could buy a Whoop, and they're going to go all in on health. And, you know, that three-legged stool becomes a very sturdy chair. And my runner-up is TikTok is going to divest under duress. I think that it's going to have to go public and the Chinese are going to divest their interest in it and just take their chips because they're going to be faced with the

• 49:53Jason Calacanis?

  existential threat during the political debates of the next two years. There will be unanimous support from Democrats and Republicans to get TikTok out of the US. Therefore, they divest.

• 50:04David Friedberg?

  Can I just test that with you guys? Because we've talked about this a lot, that, hey, we're going to ban TikTok. How many of your friends' kids or your kids, do you guys know, spend hours a week on TikTok?

• 50:16Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 50:17David Friedberg?

  It's a lot.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  Ninety percent.

• 50:19David Friedberg?

  How do you get over the political mountain of trying to ban TikTok? If you try and ban TikTok, whoever raises their hand and says, "We should ban TikTok" and actually gets it done, they're out of office. There is going to be so much pressure and backlash because people are hooked and love that app and use it all the time. To take that away from people will feel like this kind of...

• 50:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Young kids that don't have phones actually get everything that TikTok has on YouTube Shorts. So I don't think TikTok is that important because it is not actually, there is no sticky network effect inside that app. So there isn't usage that's dependent on people you know or a graph that you build. It's a lot of passively consumed content and so, you know, you're getting pushed a lot of algorithmically-defined content. You can do that on YouTube. And so I actually don't think it's that meaningfully important if TikTok goes away. I think the content creators stay. It's harder for them to build a business on YouTube Shorts. But if you look at the and measure the density of content inside TikTok, it exists almost one to one on YouTube.

• 51:22Jason Calacanis?

  That's interesting.

• 51:23David Friedberg?

  You think it'll be okay if we cancel TikTok in the US? And we say that's it, you can't have TikTok anymore?

• 51:29Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody moves to YouTube and Instagram.

• 51:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It'll be disruptive, but people will just go to YouTube and Instagram. It's not that big of a deal.

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  In fact, a lot of my favorites.

• 51:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If there was a network effect inside there, then I think people would have a reason to complain to somebody, whether it's your representative or whether it's somebody else to say, hey, don't do this. This would have a deleterious impact on my quality of life or my quality of experience. And you could make that clear claim on Instagram, Facebook, you know, Google, YouTube. But TikTok is much more brittle that way. And that's why they need to get public sooner and monetize this bloody thing. Because I think that it's very easy, actually, to deconstruct TikTok's value into these other places.

• 52:14Jason Calacanis?

  I can tell you, my favorite TikTok is Chef's Reactions. And I consume him now on Instagram because he posts, he just copies one to the other.

• 52:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Chef's Reactions is a great example where he actually got banned by TikTok and then diversified on his own. And now what he does is he publishes across multiple streams. And if you look at all the big creators, they all do that because it makes no sense to actually give the power to any one of these things.

• 52:37Jason Calacanis?

  Why have a dependency?

• 52:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why have a dependency?

• 52:39Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's keep the trains moving. Most contrarian belief, this is the Peter Thiel Award. Your chess partner, Sax, who's winning in 2022 in chess? How many chess games do you have going with Peter Thiel right now? And who's higher rated? You demolished me with your Queen's Gambit. I played one game, I got killed in seven moves. I'm ranked at 800, 900 right now. Sax is at 1800, he just walloped me. Who's higher rated right now?

• 53:04David Sacks?

  You accepted the Queen's Gambit.

• 53:05Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, I just, I didn't even know what it was. I was like, what opening is this? You're like, Queen's Gambit, you're dead. Boom.

• 53:12David Sacks?

  Queen's Gambit accepted. You don't want to accept the Queen's Gambit. It's a very pleasant game for white. I'm gonna go on a limb here, you know, and risk being wrong. My, my prediction, or most contrarian belief is that the bromance between Biden and Zelensky comes to an end at some point in 2023. And let me state the, the part that I think is conventional wisdom and everyone agrees with, which is there's gonna be a massive Ukrainian counteroffensive in the spring. And I think that could go one of two ways. Either it could make limited gains, basically the Russians fight them to a stalemate, or it could be successful and they could basically push the Russians back to the February 23rd lines and then make a play for Crimea.

• 53:56David Sacks?

  I predict that in either one of those circumstances, Zelensky's interests and Biden's interests will start to diverge. So in the case of a stalemate, which I think is probably 50/50 here, Biden's gotta start going into election mode for 2024, and I think we're saying that we're gonna be in a recession. So I think that if there's a stalemate, I think Biden's gonna tell Zelensky, wrap this thing up, it's time to negotiate, we need to get this over with. By the same token, if the counteroffensive's successful, I think that the administration, hopefully cooler heads will prevail and not let them take Crimea. That's basically what they're gunning for, is they not only wanna get back to the February 23rd lines, they wanna go all the way back to the 2014 lines of retaking Crimea.

• 54:40David Sacks?

  I think that's extremely dangerous. I think that could precipitate a nuclear war. And I think that the cooler heads of the administration will tell Zelensky to stand down, and that's the right time to make a deal. So I think in either one of these scenarios, I think you will start to see a divergence between the Ukrainian and the American interests, and that could create a rift. And I think no one's really predicting that.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think this is great. This is kind of what I thought the plan all along was, which was to deplete Putin of resources, distract him, and then get the West off of his oil and, and try to do regime change, but do it by bleeding him. This would be proof positive of that strategy, which is bleed him to the end and then sell Zelensky out. I think that's actually, I know that, I know it's cynical, but I think that's what we're doing. I think Ukraine is a tool to deplete Putin and then maybe get to regime change. I'm cynical as it gets with this. Chamath, which are most contrarian belief of 2023?

• 55:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I will go and pick that.

• 55:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Inflation, which people expect to fall off a cliff, doesn't fall off a cliff as fast or as meaningfully as people want. And so I will explain inflation as three different chapters, and we've seen the first two chapters play out. So 2021, chapter one, was all about energy inflation. And, you know, we all talked about having almost $10 gas at the pump, and what does it mean for everybody? And it caused that initial spike in inflation. And then we had it come off, and Sachs called this. He said, you know, we're going to have this sort of double hump. And 2022 was really the story of goods inflation, right?

• 56:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All these prices and all of these things went up because the input costs went up, and we all had to bear the implications of that. But then that started to ebb. And now, if you looked at the tail end of 2022, what I found super interesting was the number of articles I saw about wage inflation. Whether that was Biden using an 1800s era law to prevent a railroad strike, the number of states that increased minimum wage, the trend around unionization. So in general, my thought is that the pendulum is swinging very markedly away from capital and towards labor.

• 57:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And as the labor participation rate stays low and continues to go down, and also it's compounded by an unemployment rate that may go up, right? People are, it's going to be harder and harder to get people to do the work you need at the company you have unless you pay them more. And if that gets exaggerated, then inflation will stay where it is. It won't be as muted, and it won't fall off a cliff as people want. It'll be persistent?

• 57:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's my big contrarian wager for this year is that we see wage inflation that keeps inflation not going down as much as people want.

• 57:44Jason Calacanis?

  This is contrarian because everybody's saying, hey, the consumer's back has been broken, the credit card debt is high, and everybody's being laid off, yada, yada, yada. Therefore, goods and services, there'll be more supply than demand, and the prices will lower. Very contrarian. Freebreak, do you have a contrarian belief for 2023?

• 58:02David Friedberg?

  I think my, it follows my earlier points about the Saudi-China-Russia trade. This year, exiting 2023, it may be the case that, you know, there's historically been this belief and this continuing belief that the US dollar will always be the de facto global reserve currency. And the current mantra is that it's better than the rest. Everyone else is worse off than the US. Western Europe is in trouble, Japan is in trouble, China's in trouble, everyone's in trouble. But if there is a coalition, an economic coalition, a scaled economic coalition, that starts to shift the balance of power a little bit, and the US meanwhile is taking on extraordinary

• 58:47David Friedberg?

  debt load, spending $1.7 trillion in an omnibus bill, you know, has this massive unfunded social security problem coming down the pipe, and are trying to manage multiple funded conflicts around the world, it could be that the US dollar, coming out of 2023, starts to trade more like a risk asset and less like a risk-free asset. And so I think that that's my big contrarian bet, is that maybe this year marks the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the kind of global de facto reserve currency, based on some of these big trades that I talked about happening.

• 59:23Jason Calacanis?

  Unbelievable.

• 59:24David Friedberg?

  So that would be my, my big kind of contrarian.

• 59:26Jason Calacanis?

  Perfectly said. That's your contrarian bet, the accent, the legion of dictators, the MBSs, et cetera, they become, they form a new global currency.

• 59:35David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 59:36Jason Calacanis?

  My term, not yours.

• 59:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I'm not calling it, yeah, I wouldn't say legion of dictators, and I wouldn't say form a new global currency, but I do think that the fact that, that large economic

• 59:48David Friedberg?

  Trading models start to be done in non-dollar denominated form.

• 59:51Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 59:52David Friedberg?

  You know, weakens the, uh, the kind of reserve status of the dollar to some degree, not fully, right? It doesn't happen in a binary way. And then the dollar starts to trade more like a risk asset, like other currencies do to some degree, not fully. So maybe this is the year we start to see that shift.

• 1:00:06Jason Calacanis?

  Once again, I take the exact opposite of your contrarian belief. I believe American exceptionalism continues to soar as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, to a lesser extent, continue to self-sabotage themselves with insane wars like Putin has done, or cutting off, uh, the heads of entrepreneurs in China, figuratively, uh, I'm saying here. Uh, I think you cannot have exceptionalism without entrepreneurs, without people having freedom. And I think that means American exceptionalism based on freedom is going to continue and the legion of dictators, I believe, are gonna stab each other in the back before they change the world or move the currency. Can't trust them. They'll, they'll snip at each other. And/or they'll self-sabotage themselves. Where do you fall out on these?

• 1:00:51Jason Calacanis?

  Where do you fall on our opposites here?

• 1:00:53David Sacks?

  I think that America is really feeling its Wheaties right now. I think that American power is immense. I think that the superiority of our weapons in Ukraine's been one of the big surprises of the war.

• 1:01:04Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go, Palmer Lucky!

• 1:01:05David Sacks?

  I don't see the world in the simplistic, uh, good guys versus bad guys frame that Jacob does. However, America is on turbo right now. And, um, yes, it is true that the BRICS would love to get off of the dollar because we are now using the dollar and the financial system of SWIFT as a, as a geopolitical tool and a weapon. And they would very much like to be off of our, uh, dependence on our currency. But I don't think they're anywhere close to be able to do that yet. And like I said, America is on turbo right now. Now, one thing, one thing I want to mention, this just came out. White House correspondent named Jennifer Jacobs just reported that the US has agreed to send Bradley armored vehicles, basically our best tanks, to Ukraine.

• 1:01:51David Sacks?

  Previously, US officials had balked at sending armored vehicles, saying heavier weapons would be too difficult for Ukraine to operate and maintain, but allies are moving to provide such weapons. So we keep providing Ukrainians with more and more sophisticated weapons, more and more support. Like I said, this is leading up to a huge Ukrainian counteroffensive in the spring, and I really don't know what's going to happen at that point. I do think that the Russians will escalate. I don't think they can afford to lose this war. They view it as existential. And I, like I said, I hope cooler heads will prevail, and if the Ukrainians are successful at breaking through, I hope that the Biden administration will shut this down before they try to retake Crimea. Because, you know, we've discussed this before, I think the Russians, confronted with a choice

• 1:02:35David Sacks?

  between a total defeat that includes losing Crimea and their naval base at Sevastopol, and sees the Ukrainian flag flying over their base at Sevastopol, if that's a choice between that, or potentially using a tactical nuke, maybe at the mouth of the Crimean peninsula as a firewall, I think they could choose the nuke option. So it's a very dangerous situation, and, you know, very, very dynamic. There's a lot of possibilities.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's go on to best performing asset of 2023. I'm going with seed stage investing again. I don't think people want to get into these toxic cap tables at the late stage, as Chamov pointed out, so I go with seed stage, and, you know, end up to Series A, the people brave enough to place bets, the founders brave enough to start companies. I believe it's the best performing asset class of 2023. Chamov, what do you got?

• 1:03:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that there's still a lot of uncertainty in the world and in the markets, and so I'm generally concerned that there's a lot of chop. And so I picked something that's pretty conservative, but I would have a combination of cash and the front end of the yield curve. So T-bills, all the way up to two-year bonds. So you can generate four and a half, probably by the end of this year, 5% pretty safely owning this stuff while you wait for things to become more certain. And the way that I think about it is that I would rather miss the first 10 or 15% of

• 1:04:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a rally, once we're really done with this stuff, than try to overcorrect and try to pick a bottom, just because I think that you could lose a lot of money. So.

• 1:04:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the goal for this year is to stay resilient and in the game. And so owning, having a bunch of cash on the sidelines, ready to pound it in. Meanwhile, a portion of it collecting 5% is not such a bad thing while you wait for the bottom.

• 1:04:30Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic.

• 1:04:31David Sacks?

  My answer was actually very, very similar, which is if Kashkari is right, that rates are going to 5.4% in Q1, why wouldn't you just put all your money in short-term T-bills? You earn 5, 5.5% risk-free.

• 1:04:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43David Sacks?

  Like, set it and forget it.

• 1:04:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46David Sacks?

  And that's why capital flows are moving hugely right now from equities into bonds, especially if we're going to a recession, which is inherently deflationary.

• 1:04:56Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got, Friedberg? Forming asset class of 2023.

• 1:05:00David Friedberg?

  One of the things, so I think it's inevitable that we continue to have significant infrastructure spending from both the stimulus and security point of view. So, you know, we kind of want to continue to stimulate the economy and support growth. We want to continue to create jobs and support this transition. And if the recession predictions play out true and the job market does loosen, it's very tight right now, there's going to be even more of an impetus to continue to do infrastructure investment. But I think there's also these big economic transitions happening underway right now with pharmaceuticals, with semiconductors, with energy. There's a lot that we've talked about where there's a security problem and a redundancy problem.

• 1:05:43David Friedberg?

  And so, you know, there are a couple of waves to kind of play this infrastructure spending thesis in each of those areas. I've kind of highlighted four of them. One is in semiconductor capital equipment, so Kayla, Tencor, Applied Materials, that range of businesses that provide and sell the equipment into the fabs and the organizations that build semiconductor manufacturing facilities. The second is kind of in oil and gas services, so similar to what Sax said earlier, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, that class of businesses, I think, benefit in this, in this environment. And this is independent of kind of economic conditions, certainly because these are big multi-year spending projects.

• 1:06:24David Friedberg?

  The third is in the equipment to support them, so Deere and Caterpillar. And then the fourth, I think, is an important one. I'll talk about this in a minute with respect to my biggest kind of anticipated thing for next year, which is pharmaceutical infrastructure. So Thermo Fisher, and there's some company and others like them, because there's a lot of build out happening to support these big transitions happening in the modalities that are being used in pharmaceutical drugs and diagnostics. And then I think that there's also a couple of these businesses that are diversified, like Danaher, Honeywell, Thermo Fisher is a good example, that play across multiple of these opportunities. So those are all great businesses to own, and you don't need to worry about, you know, they're growing cash flow positive, dividend paying companies. And you don't need to worry about, you know, am I getting 5% or 5.5% based on the equity

• 1:07:09David Friedberg?

  price this year? These are long range businesses that are building real value, growing their top line, and compounding value from within. And then they're acquiring a lot of smaller businesses very cheap. I'll say, well, it's an important trend I've seen across these companies, Danaher, Honeywell, Thermo Fisher. They buy small companies, they pay very little, and they immediately get massive return on invested capital, like they're in the high teens. So why get 5% on T-bills when you can get high teens ROIC on the management teams running these incredible platforms? So that's where I'm most excited for this year.

• 1:07:42Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, now let's move on.

• 1:07:44David Friedberg?

  That was like a mad, that was like my mad, my mad money segment. I've never done the mad money segment before, but there you guys go.

• 1:07:50Jason Calacanis?

  Worst performing asset? I went with energy because, not that I think it's not important, but it just feels like everybody rushed into it in 2022. So it feels like it's overheated, and if we are in a recession, people might lower consumption in terms of energy and be looking for cheaper alternatives. So it could be overheated, so I went with energy. Chamath, worst performing asset? You got one?

• 1:08:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that if we've learned anything from the last three years, you have to separate the valuation of a company and how it performs in the stock market with its value in society. So for example, if you look at Zoom, Zoom's valuation has cratered, but its value in society has probably continued to go up. It's still a massively relied upon tool. The point is that markets do not give you credit for the value in society. They will give you credit when you are about to overearn, but then they'll pull it all back when they think that you're going to underearn. So in that lens, I think that tech will have a tough year. I think energy will have a really shit year.

• 1:08:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And probably the biggest asset class that is going to get pressured is going to be junk debt. And the reason is a bunch of these variable rate loans, when rates are at five and six percent, that all of a sudden are like 11, 12, 13, 14 percent coupons, a bunch of companies will have trouble meeting their debt obligations and will have to restructure the debt or will have to file. So.

• 1:09:19Jason Calacanis?

  Saks worst performing asset for 2023.

• 1:09:22David Sacks?

  Oh, a subcategory of what you must have said. I think office towers in San Francisco are, that is some serious toxic debt, 27% vacancy rates and growing as leases roll. I think that a lot of these buildings, maybe virtually all of the San Francisco downtown is going to be owned by the bank soon because no one can.

• 1:09:41Jason Calacanis?

  Commercial real estate in San Francisco.

• 1:09:43David Sacks?

  Well, specifically the office towers, specifically the office towers, because no one wants to be in those skyscraper buildings south of market, you know, mired in homelessness. So, um, yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of those buildings can be owned by the banks. There's going to be some major fire sales. Remember, this was the hottest commercial real estate market in the country a few years ago, and now it's the worst.

• 1:10:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, look what happened to, look what happened to B REIT. What do you think about that crazy thing that happened with the Blackstone REIT? I mean, that's nuts. You know, this is.

• 1:10:12Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what happened?

• 1:10:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. Blackstone has a product called B REIT. It's like a $70 billion exchange traded fund effectively. And what it is, is the ability for individual investors to own access to Blackstone's, you know, commercial real estate portfolio. And they had such a massive amount of redemptions that they had to close redemptions at the end of Q4. And they were worried that the redemptions were going to continue to go up. These are individual investors who basically sees the writing on the wall, as David said, and wants their money out. And so they went to the University of California pension system and they essentially got a huge infusion of capital. I think it was about $4 billion where they guaranteed 11 and a half percent interest to these guys for the $4 billion.

• 1:10:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they also posted $1 billion of their own equity in, in the actual REIT to backstop it. So. What does it show you? I think what Sacks is saying is really right. It's, it may not just be in San Francisco, but you know, with all of these people either getting laid off, with all of these people now working remotely, we may finally start to see the beginning of the reckoning in commercial real estate, which has been an unbelievably performant asset class up until right about now. And, and on top of that, you have to factor in these much higher rates. And so these building owners, if they financed it, which they invariably have always financed, they have huge variable rate payments that are due on these buildings. The rent rolls are lower. Even people like Twitter is just refusing to pay the rent.

• 1:11:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So you have to take them to court. So it elongates when they have to pay. And so you could miss a bunch of rent payments and all of a sudden the banks could just go crazy and take ownership of these things.

• 1:11:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Do you have a worst performing asset class for 2023 prediction? Sultan of Science, Queen of Kinoa, David Freiber.

• 1:12:00David Friedberg?

  Uh, it's, it's really simple. I've mentioned it before. It's consumer credit. We assume that raising, rising rates and inflation would taper down consumer demand, meaning consumers buying goods and stuff. And that certainly hasn't happened. I'm in Vegas right now. I was in the car yesterday and the driver grew up in Vegas. Uh, he's like, in all the, I've lived my whole life in Vegas. He's like, I've never seen a December like we just had. It was packed the entire month. He's like, normally in Vegas, it's dead up until Christmas and then New Year's people come into town, but it's normally dead. He's like, I've never seen such a busy month. And I think we see this in the numbers. Consumers are still spending like it's 2021. They're still spending like interest rates are zero. As we talked about,

• 1:12:43David Friedberg?

  consumer credit is skyrocketing while rates are skyrocketing. Um, and so I think we're going to run into a real wall with respect to consumer credit in, um, sometime this year. And you're going to see, as you guys know, this is such a complicated, interwoven market of assets that the way that this, this can be traded, there's a lot of different ways to trade it, but I think it's going to be, in general, consumers are not going to be able to meet their debt obligations. And it's going to be really interesting.

• 1:13:09Jason Calacanis?

  Could be mortgages, could be credit card debt. Defaults are coming.

• 1:13:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah. And I think the markets, the market has priced in a bunch of this stuff. Obviously, companies like Affirm and you know, the, the, um, uh, what are they called? Buy now, pay later companies. But credit card companies, mortgages, there's a lot of assets that you can start to kind of pick apart. Where do you think this unravels first? How does, what gets hit hardest? What's underpriced and overpriced? Probably a lot of good pair trading to do as Chamath kind of loves to talk about, uh, with respect to which of these are more likely or less likely to be sensitive to this dynamic. But there's, I think it's, it's going to be a pretty ugly scene. Uh, consumers just have way too much debt relative to their earnings right now. And it's pretty nasty.

• 1:13:47Jason Calacanis?

  And they have some confidence that they'll always have a job or some way to pay their four easy payments for their biggest trip.

• 1:13:53David Friedberg?

  I'll say it's, it's hard, it's muscle memory is serious. You know, you come out of 2021 when you had, um, it's not just stimulus checks. It was the low interest rate and easy credit availability everywhere. And it's just easy to jump into getting new stuff and cool stuff. And then when you get used to getting new stuff every week or every month, you kind of stick with it and you're like, I don't want to give it up just yet. I just, not just yet, not just yet. You know, and so it's, it's hard to kind of step back from spending when you have a new type of lifestyle. And I think that's what's going on.

• 1:14:20Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is an incredible observation.

• 1:14:22David Friedberg?

  There's a great TikTok of this guy that runs car dealerships and he sent them out on like, how much incredible money, like what a significant percentage of people's income they are spending on their monthly car payments. And people buy these cars that are well beyond what should be kind of a reasonable budget. If you were to go to Suzy Orman for advice.

• 1:14:39Jason Calacanis?

  They stretch.

• 1:14:39David Friedberg?

  They said, do not buy that freaking car. They stretch. And the, the stretching is going to, is going to snap this year. Yeah.

• 1:14:45Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Which brings us to the most anticipated, I love it, great one. Most anticipated trend of 2023 related to yours. I went with austerity. I have a friend who sometimes flies private often. And I was talking to him about his Christmas vacation. This friend of mine, Chamath, instead of flying private to his vacation, he had to pick up his kids, he had to go back and forth. He was driving his car.

• 1:15:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That was me.

• 1:15:11Jason Calacanis?

  Three hour, that was you. Oh, okay. I didn't want to, I didn't want to declog you.

• 1:15:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was so, it was so great.

• 1:15:18Jason Calacanis?

  Who would normally fight privately in Tahoe. And he's like, no, I can't go out with you skiing on Friday. I gotta pick up my kids. And then I'm driving back. I said, wait a second. How are you doing that? He's like, I'm driving a car. I said, what? Who's driving the car? He said, I'm driving the car. And that's why I say austerity is my anticipated trend of 23 and 3.

• 1:15:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree with you. I actually think this is a really good opportunity to pull back on so much waste. I haven't really looked at my household budget in probably two or three years. Didn't even bother.

• 1:15:46Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 1:15:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then, and then when I looked at it, I was like, wow, this is really inflated to a level that I didn't expect.

• 1:15:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:15:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it makes a lot of sense to live in a more heads down austere way.

• 1:15:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 1:16:00Jason Calacanis?

  I, well, I mean, look at tonight's menu. You went with duck. I, I guess the olive fed wagyu, everything's off the menu now. No black truffles. We're having duck. We're down to poultry. Next week, we're gonna have pasta. It's okay, Chamath. Austerity measures for everybody. Sacks?

• 1:16:14David Sacks?

  They call it foul for a reason, right?

• 1:16:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, God. Sacks, uh, do you buy into austerity where Chamath and I are austerity belt tightening as our trends? Where were you? What's your trend for?

• 1:16:23David Sacks?

  I think that's a pretty good trend. The trend that I am going to suggest, uh, will be to your great disappointment, Jay Cal, which is Trump's influence in the GOP continues to wane. You're seeing it in real time right now. The headline is Trump's endorsement proves worthless to Kevin McCarthy in the speaker bid. Even the MAGA faithful like Matt Gaetz, like Lauren Boebert, they are ignoring Trump's pleas to get behind my Kevin. And in fact, they're kind of not just defying him, but making fun of him. Matt Gaetz had a repost to Trump saying sad exclamation point. And Boebert was saying that Trump needed to get behind her movement.

• 1:17:06David Sacks?

  So we have now a level of, of open defiance to Trump and the GOP. His endorsements just not, are not what they once were. And even if somehow. Kevin McCarthy pulls this off, I think all that means is that Trump gets blamed for every swampy rhino compromise that McCarthy has to make to keep the government running over the next two years. So it's a lose-lose.

• 1:17:28David Friedberg?

  Does that mean that populism is on the wane, do you think? Like, because it's the electorate that got him elected in the first place. He was not very popular with politicians. He was kind of an outcast when he got elected the first time. And that may be the case now, but he still got elected because the population loved him. People loved him. Is that going to happen? Do you think that means that the populism is kind of waning, or the interest of the voters is waning on him? Or is it just the political parties alignment with him?

• 1:17:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Boebert only won by a few thousand votes. She didn't exactly crush it in Colorado.

• 1:17:57David Sacks?

  I think a lot of this has to do with Trump's personal standing after the midterms. The candidates that he personally picked that were all in tough races, they all basically lost. It was about the distraction he caused by making the 2020 election such a big deal, constantly looking backwards. So I think the Republican Party doesn't like the antics. It's not about the policies, I don't think. I think it's 100% about Trump's electability and about his ability to get things done. And it's not really about the positions, per se. So I think, Friedberg, to answer your question, I think that the future of the GOP will incorporate this populism, but it's going to find a better integration with the establishment wing of the Republican Party. And future candidates will have to basically

• 1:18:42David Sacks?

  satisfy both of those wings of the party.

• 1:18:44David Friedberg?

  Sax, was it, was it straw that, or maybe the two straws that broke the camel's back for Republicans and Trump in that relationship? Was it January 6 and the election denial? Like, for Republicans, is it just like, come on, those are the two things?

• 1:18:57David Sacks?

  This constant focusing on the 2020 election. First, it cost them, it cost Republicans that Georgia runoff seat with Purdue against Warnock. Purdue won on election night, didn't clear 50%, had to go to the runoff. This was, happened the day before January 6. This happened on January 5 of 2021. That was the first race where Trump's antics cost them. Then you had this midterm election where, you know, all the candidates who had to appease Trump by talking about, again, the last election, instead of looking to the future, they got punished by the voters. I think Republicans want to win. I mean, they're tired of losing.

• 1:19:34David Friedberg?

  It's that simple.

• 1:19:35David Sacks?

  It's that simple.

• 1:19:36David Friedberg?

  Yeah, the job of a politician is to win. Friedberg, you got an anticipated trend of 2023?

• 1:19:42David Friedberg?

  I am excited about and want to share the point of view that I think cell and gene therapies are becoming more mainstream. So these are pharmaceutical modalities where we use gene editing systems where you can actually go in and change or add genetic material to cells in your body to resolve things like genetic diseases or change protein deficiencies or introduce new proteins. And then cell therapies where we engineer cells, put them in the body, and those cells go and do things like attack and destroy cancer cells, for example. There are currently 27 FDA-approved cell and gene therapies on the market. There are over 1,000 in clinical trials, many of which are already showing extraordinary efficacy and benefit. Today, these therapies cost upwards of $1 million.

• 1:20:27David Friedberg?

  So I think there's a massive, and talking about the infrastructure investment conversation earlier, because of the number of diseases and the number of conditions and the number of people that these therapies can treat, I think there's massive infrastructure investment opportunity coming forward this year. But also seeing these come to market, come out of the clinical trials, get FDA-approved, we have to ramp up and build up the infrastructure needed because it's not traditional where you make a drug in a factory and send it to people and they get it injected. These are much more complex, they require a much more complicated delivery mechanism, you have to have systems to engineer cells and edit them and put them back in your body. Those systems today take days or weeks and cost, you know, as a result, $1 million plus per treatment. So I think that the cell and gene therapy opportunity, you know, the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference starts

• 1:21:11David Friedberg?

  this week. It's the biggest biotech and healthcare conference in the world, starts in San Francisco on Monday. This is one of the biggest areas of interest and one that everyone's investing against. But as these come to market, there's, you know, we talked about this last week, genetic diseases, types of cancer that are going to be addressed. And I'm really excited about seeing more of these products come to market and seeing the whole kind of infrastructure and delivery system change.

• 1:21:33Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Sorry to interrupt, trying to keep the trains moving, gene editing, very good choice. All right. We end with this, it's a little bit fun. Most anticipated media for 2023, these are things, we like to talk about the media here, sometimes we talked about

• 1:21:47Jason Calacanis?

  White Lotus, season two, amazing season. And maybe what you're looking forward to next year. I am really looking forward to in film Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's movie about the Manhattan Project. That should be extraordinary. I loved, was Dunkirk his as well? I love Dunkirk. I like everything he does. And when he, if this is him becoming like a history uncle, I'm here for it. I'm here for Nolan becoming our history uncle instead of Batman.

• 1:22:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What was the one after Inception that was really confusing? The one with Denzel Washington's son, with John Washington?

• 1:22:19Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, yes, it was, um, I couldn't finish it. I tried twice. I gotta go with the third shot on that one. It was.

• 1:22:26David Friedberg?

  Oh, yeah. It was, it was his worst film.

• 1:22:28Jason Calacanis?

  What's the name of it? We can't remember.

• 1:22:30David Friedberg?

  It was called, uh, Tenet. Tenet.

• 1:22:33Jason Calacanis?

  Tenet, yes. About like time and reverse and this. It was.

• 1:22:36David Friedberg?

  Impossible to follow. Did you guys see his original film, which was incredible, Memento?

• 1:22:39Jason Calacanis?

  Of course. Memento was fantastic.

• 1:22:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. Memento was great. Inception's incredible.

• 1:22:45David Friedberg?

  It was enough mind, mind, yeah. It was mind bending enough that you're like, oh my God, incredible. And then I think they took it too far, Tenet. I tried to watch it three times. I'm generally pretty good with these sorts of films and love them, but oh my God, it was impossible to follow. He, he took it too far.

• 1:22:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:22:59David Friedberg?

  So hopefully he goes back to his roots.

• 1:23:00Jason Calacanis?

  In terms of TV series, I'm looking forward to Secession coming back, Ashoka, who is, uh, Anakin Skywalker, AKA Darth Vader's, uh, Padawan, Ted Lasso, season three coming up. Those are for me incredible. And then on the book front, man, the Michael Lewis book about SBF is gonna be next level. I cannot wait for that. Sax, you're a media junkie. What do you got on your list of things you're looking forward to? Or should I say, what does Tucker's writers, what do they put down for you?

• 1:23:26David Sacks?

  Well, Jacob, I thought you were gonna pick, I thought that for movie, you're gonna pick Cocaine Bear.

• 1:23:31Jason Calacanis?

  I can't wait for Cocaine Bear.

• 1:23:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cocaine Bear does look really amazing.

• 1:23:36Jason Calacanis?

  The profits of Cocaine Bear is extraordinary. A bear is in the woods and a, I guess people who are trafficking in cocaine drop their, or crashes and the bear eats the cocaine and then goes on a rampage. It's kinda like a, a genre film, like in the crocodile way. By the way, I'm, I'm listening to Quentin Tarantino's book, by the way, of criticism. Get the audiobook. You'll like it, Sax. He talks about all the films in the seventies. Very good. Shout out to Quentin. What do you got? What do you got on your short list? A history uncle?

• 1:24:07David Sacks?

  Me?

• 1:24:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08David Sacks?

  Well, I just gave you one.

• 1:24:10Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Cogan Bear, top of your list. We'll watch it together.

• 1:24:13David Sacks?

  Oppenheimer was on my list, and I think Marvel is doing a good job developing a new villain to rival Thanos with this with Kang. I don't know what phase they're on now, but Loki, season two, and then the new Ant-Man movie. And, you know, I thought after Thanos, he wouldn't really be able to top that. But they've come up with a really good concept, I think, for the next, you know, 20 Marvel movies.

• 1:24:36Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then it will eventually become Galactus.

• 1:24:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. You guys have completely fucked up. You have missed the most obvious slam dunk.

• 1:24:43Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. Sade's new album, go.

• 1:24:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dune, part two.

• 1:24:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I haven't watched number one yet.

• 1:24:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, what?

• 1:24:52Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I what happened was.

• 1:24:54David Sacks?

  Wasn't it?

• 1:24:55Jason Calacanis?

  My wife wants to watch it.

• 1:24:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is so stylistically beautiful. It is a little boring. There's not a lot going on, but it's so well shot. It's a it's visually just stunning. I mean, if you need to watch it on a big screen with big speakers and, but part two comes out in November this year.

• 1:25:12Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 1:25:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's gonna be great.

• 1:25:14Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, tell us what documentary on veganism you recommend and you're anticipating for 2023. What vegan documentary or animal abuse documentary?

• 1:25:23David Friedberg?

  I am excited about the generative AI-based media that I think is gonna start to kind of rocket this year. We could see, for example, the first, you know, AI-written symphony, the first kind of AI-written published novel. How interesting would that be, like a full novel published by AI? And more maybe short films based on AI-driven script. And maybe even what I'm really excited about is these AI-based interactive video games or kind of experiences where you, the user, kind of get to create and live your own world through some sort of video game type modality. So I think AI-driven media.

• 1:26:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right. There you have it, folks. There are.

• 1:26:04David Sacks?

  Speaking of pop culture chaos, I guess Prince Harry has a book coming out that's called Spare.

• 1:26:11Jason Calacanis?

  Despair?

• 1:26:12David Sacks?

  Spare.

• 1:26:13Jason Calacanis?

  Like pick up a spare when you're playing bowling?

• 1:26:16David Sacks?

  No, but you know, like in, in the English monarchy, they, there's the heir and the spare.

• 1:26:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 1:26:22David Sacks?

  So he's calling himself spare. But to me, that's like a weird self-description. Yeah, like that's, that's how you see yourself.

• 1:26:28Jason Calacanis?

  He's being self-deprecating. He didn't pick that. They, they paid him so much money. I heard they have to sell 1.7 million books to break even.

• 1:26:36David Sacks?

  But you know what it reminds me of is when Leonard Nimoy wrote a book, I think he wrote a book called I Am Spock, and then he wrote a book called I Am Not Spock.

• 1:26:45Jason Calacanis?

  Nice.

• 1:26:46David Sacks?

  He could never get comfortable with the fact that he was just Spock.

• 1:26:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:49David Sacks?

  And there's something weird about calling yourself spare. Like, you know, you're clearly not comfortable with.

• 1:26:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's like everything, yeah, everything they taught you, everything I learned at Harvard Business School and everything they don't teach at Harvard Business School. You can, you can do both books. All right, listen, this has been great. Breaking news as we're talking here, ChatGPT, OpenAI, doing a tender offer at 29 billion. With no revenue, you're losing 3 billion a day. Oh my God, who is buying a 29 billion?

• 1:27:20David Sacks?

  It's, it's Founders Fund, or reportedly, according to the Journal, it's Founders Fund and Thrive Capital. So Founders Fund does not generally do super overpriced deals.

• 1:27:29David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Yeah, I would buy that.

• 1:27:31Jason Calacanis?

  That's a silly bet. I mean, come on.

• 1:27:33David Friedberg?

  That, I mean, dude, are you kidding me? That's, that could be a $300 billion company. That's a 10x.

• 1:27:36David Sacks?

  Right, but that, yeah.

• 1:27:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's a 10x from here. I wouldn't, I would not.

• 1:27:41David Friedberg?

  Totally could be. By the way, you guys remember that the, um, the origin of OpenAI, I don't know what the current situation is, but it was a nonprofit.

• 1:27:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:27:50David Friedberg?

  Where they said investors put money in, but the investor's maximum return was 100x on the dollar invested. So it's a nonprofit, but it's a profit up to 100x.

• 1:27:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, that happened afterwards. It's when they converted to a.

• 1:27:59David Friedberg?

  That was the original model.

• 1:28:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, no, the, no, the original model was a pure.

• 1:28:02Jason Calacanis?

  So did the nonprofit funders get any shares?

• 1:28:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, but the original model was a pure nonprofit where there was no cap because there was no concept of equity.

• 1:28:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When they flipped, they capped everybody to 100x on the return. So the original money.

• 1:28:14David Friedberg?

  100x, but not anymore or still?

• 1:28:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But no, the original money, which was like Elon's money.

• 1:28:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who else put in money? Reid Hoffman. Yeah. All that money came in as pure nonprofit. So I don't know how it converted, but that's when they...

• 1:28:29Jason Calacanis?

  Or did it convert? Did those people who funded it originally get any shares in the for-profit?

• 1:28:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We could find out. Probably they did. I mean, it would make sense that they... We'll find out.

• 1:28:37Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, wait, if this is a tender offer from 1% of the company...

• 1:28:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You wouldn't buy at 27 billion? You wouldn't buy shares at 27 billion? So again, like, the thing that I want to impress upon you is like, there is an enormous amount of work that they do, that what their biggest gap to monetizing this will be finding unique content that they learn on that nobody else has access to. And this is why I really think it's important to understand. If you have enough compute, these, all of these unsupervised learning models, if you run them on the same training set, will converge to the same answer. So you're just getting there first. So in order to be really defensible, you have to get there in a unique way. And so either you're going to hand tune or you're going to have inputs that are different.

• 1:29:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I don't know the answer. That's why like, they have to answer that question in their fundraising. And I'm sure that they did because these are smart investors. But that's the big idea that you have to overcome. And again, you have to think like, you think Google is sitting on their hands?

• 1:29:37Jason Calacanis?

  No. Or deep lying.

• 1:29:40David Sacks?

  Why 29 billion? Like, what fundamentals is that based on? Like, why not 5 billion? Why not 3 billion? I mean, like, why not 10 billion? Like, what makes it 29 billion?

• 1:29:48Jason Calacanis?

  They doubled their last valuation. That's what it is. It's all momentum. It's had nothing to do with reality, right? I mean... This would imply at a 30... The public comps of like, Google trades at what? 25 or 30 EBIT times EBITDA? So this would imply a billion dollars in EBITDA. A billion dollars in EBITDA, 3 million dollars a day. They're losing 3 million dollars a day on computer reportedly. 3 million dollars a day in profit on what product? I don't know to have a

• 1:30:16David Friedberg?

  That's probably the issue. I think, look, I mean, my point was if these guys open up a set of tools that support all these applications and services to emerge on top of what they've built, and they're getting red share, getting payments out of that, it's going to very quickly turn into a real

• 1:30:30Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the problem, Friedberg. This is why that can't happen. They don't have the rights to the data they built the training set on. And the second they commercialize it, the second anybody pays them, whoever they base this on, they're going to get sued into oblivion. I predict sued into oblivion.

• 1:30:46David Friedberg?

  Let's talk, let's, let's actually, let's talk about that in the next show. Because I think that's a, like, the, the way that AI works, and we should probably bring someone like Sam on to talk about it. But the way that AI works on training data, and now people are making claims that the training data is copyright, therefore, the model output is, protects that copyright, is, I think, worthy of a good conversation.

• 1:31:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's interesting is, you know, the early, the early version of the, of the internet was very simple. It's like you had this file called roblox.txt, and you would basically be open to a crawler not. And that's what would allow Google to basically go and spider your pages.

• 1:31:19Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:31:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so we have to replace this concept of that with this.

• 1:31:23Jason Calacanis?

  AI.txt.

• 1:31:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, you could make a claim that this is no different than, you know, a spider crawling a webpage, except that in, in the search case, it was much cleaner, which is, we're just going to index your page and redirect people to you. Here, it's, we're actually going to create a derivative work because of you in part. And I do think that that's going to be a very interesting legal threshold that has to get figured out.

• 1:31:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here it is, Chamath. You're, you're, you're nailing it exactly. It's a derivative work, and they did not have permission to use it. And it impedes upon the original authors, whether it's a photo, it's a song, it's a piece of code, it impedes upon their ability to do commerce in the world. You are interfering with their ability to monetize their content, and the percentage you're using is 100%. So when you get to fair use, non-commercial use is very protected, parity is protected, education's protected. But when you dip into using the entirety of the work, which they're doing, And you impede upon the person's ability to do commerce and you confuse the public.

• 1:32:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is why-

• 1:32:25Jason Calacanis?

  These are the tests that they will fail, fail, fail.

• 1:32:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is why I think that most people don't understand what AI is. They don't even understand the difference between training and inference. So hopefully, there is some more understanding of this. But if you use the same data set, you will eventually converge to the same outputs absent of hand tuning weights, which has its own issues, and absent any asymmetrically different data that you have that nobody else has.

• 1:32:52Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Yes. So if you are Apple and you have the watch data, or you're Google and you have the search data, or you're a weather company, you have the weather data and you're a proprietor, of course. There's a very easy solution to this, Chamath. Number one, citations. When the algorithm gives you an answer, it should say, what were the top percentage sources of this information? How did the AI use other people's-

• 1:33:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but Jason, just again, look, if you look inside of a transformer, the problem is, okay, that you're going to have trillions of ranks, trillions of weights, trillions. And so how are you going to decide how to basically draw a line under a threshold? This was actually a useful input and this was not. So again, I just think that-

• 1:33:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's hard.

• 1:33:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A very few small class of people actually understand this. Like, the great person to actually bring in to talk about this would be Andre Karpathy, not. And I think because Andre was there-

• 1:33:41Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:33:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And at Tesla, and but he can say it in a very dispassionate way to explain this to people, I think would be useful.

• 1:33:47Jason Calacanis?

  Let's do it.

• 1:33:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should ask him to come on.

• 1:33:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean-

• 1:33:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I can ask him. I can ask-

• 1:33:51Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is brand, this, the law, Sax, you're an attorney, you understand fair use, copyright, all this stuff. The law, correct me if I'm wrong here, Sax, does not anticipate this.

• 1:34:01David Sacks?

  Look, this is a highly specialized area. I don't want to pretend like I understand the law in this area. You know, I'd want to talk to a specialist.

• 1:34:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, okay. And so anybody-

• 1:34:09David Friedberg?

  Let's have this conversation, because I think, yeah.

• 1:34:11Jason Calacanis?

  This is a great juicy discussion.

• 1:34:13David Friedberg?

  I think there's more work for us to talk about because-

• 1:34:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is probably why, by the way, they started as open source, because it was like a slam dunk thing to make this a nonprofit and open source everything, maybe in part because of these issues. But if you just let the code run free-

• 1:34:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You probably don't have to even deal with these issues, right?

• 1:34:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they they closed it. Remember their claim? The claim was this is too dangerous. Their original claim was it's too dangerous for people to not see the code. Then Sam flipped on that and he said it's too dangerous for people to see the code. And it started out as a nonprofit where the idea was the way to keep this safe is for everybody to see the code. But they didn't make any money. Whatever it is. They went private and they flipped the decision. So keep that in mind as well.

• 1:34:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's a he's a very, very, very clever business person.

• 1:35:00Jason Calacanis?

  He's savvy. And.

• 1:35:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, Paul Graham, when Paul Graham picked Sam to run Y C, Paul Graham said that this is the most impressive person I've met since Steve Jobs.

• 1:35:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Remember that?

• 1:35:12Jason Calacanis?

  Come on the pot. I do remember that. He said something similar about Gary Tan is now running Y C starting this week. Sam Altman, friend of the pot, come on all in anytime.

• 1:35:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And has played in our poker game several times.

• 1:35:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, yes, we we we had a tough situation there where you interfered in a hand, if you remember. All right, listen. This has been. There was a Sam and I were in a hand of poker. He raised. I had two pair and I'm trying to figure out, does he have a set or is he bluffing me? I think he's got top pair. And you were like, oh, look at this. And you started commenting on the hand.

• 1:35:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God, I remember this.

• 1:35:43Jason Calacanis?

  The call or not yet. And I'm like, and I'm like, Chamath. For my La Bouch, let's let's stop talking here because I'm trying to unplay hand. I'm like, okay, Sam would get and I basically came to the conclusion Sam would get delight. Great delight bluffing me off a hand. He's a risk taker. He knows I'm conservative. He knows he's a risk taker. I'm gonna call here with my I had bottom two. I'm like, does he have a set? And there was also a straight on the board. I'm like, fuck it. I I at best, I'm you know, even money here. And there was a lot in the pot. So I was just doing the pot odds while I'm doing the pot odds. You were like which is usually me. I'm usually the one being reprimanded for talking. But it was notable. All right, listen. Love you, besties.

• 1:36:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why don't you tell people that there's no comments?

• 1:36:26Jason Calacanis?

  And just as a programming note, we turned off comments for a couple of weeks on the YouTube just to see how it psychologically affects me. And for Chamath to just F with all you Brigadooners. We love you. Besties. This has been a great episode. Two great and his Twitter is at Chamath and he doesn't read it.

• 1:36:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just so everyone listening knows, Sax Sax and I voted against turning off comments.

• 1:36:49Jason Calacanis?

  I voted in favor of whatever got Chamath's vote for the All In Summit 23. So that's how I vote. This is horse trading now, but the podcast has never been better. Besties spending time together on the slopes is the cure to all evils. We'll see you next time. Love you besties. Bye bye. Love you guys. Bye bye.

• 1:37:28Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are gone.

• 1:37:31Speaker 04

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:37:36Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:37:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just just like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  What? Your big B. What? Where are your feet? What?

• 1:37:52Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get mercy. Besties are back.